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Isn't software written by hand more likely to be abandoned due to the extremely costly nature of keeping its development going? Abandonware definitely existed prior to vibe coding. As long as it's open source, now you can pick it up and keep vibe-developing it if you care to, for very little money/effort.

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Possibly, but sunk costs fallacy often means it's possible to rely on the maintainer to stick around. I think we all know how disposable LLM-generated code can be. If I wanted to vibe code my own thing, I'd do it my way rather than fork an abandoned project.

What's needed is more of a nexus thing where there's evidence multiple people work together or some long track record of someone scratching a very specific itch. Or if we're all using agents to build the same thing some way for them to team up. It's a sort of proof of life thing and it's difficult to distinguish those from flashes in the pan.

Rather than sunk cost fallacy, I would call it survivorship bias: the projects that someone has consistently worked on over time are a small fraction of the total projects out there, and those that have survived are probably useful to someone (at the very least, their developers).

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